Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter

by Mario Vargas Llosa

  “That’s true, I’m a minor, I was peacefully studying for my law degree, and then…” I said, but nobody laughed at my joke.

  “If they find out I’ve told you, they’ll kill me,” Nancy said. “Swear to me you won’t say a word.”

  Her parents had solemnly given her notice that if she committed the slightest indiscretion they wouldn’t let her out of the house for a year, not even to attend Mass. They had given her such a stern lecture that she’d even hesitated whether she should tell us what had happened. The family had known everything since the very beginning and hadn’t said a word, thinking that it was simply an inconsequential flirtation on the part of a flighty woman who wanted to add an exotic prize, an adolescent, to the list of amorous game she had bagged. But since Aunt Julia had not scrupled to parade about the streets and public squares hand in hand with the lad, and more and more friends and relatives had learned of the romance—even the grandparents knew what was going on, thanks to a bit of gossip passed on to them by Aunt Celia—the whole thing had become a scandal and something that was bound to harm the youngster (that is to say, me), who doubtless had lost all interest in studying ever since the divorcée had turned his head, and hence the family had decided to intervene.

  “And what are they going to do to save me?” I asked, still not too panic-stricken at this point.

  “Write to your folks,” Nancy said. “Your two oldest uncles—Uncle Jorge and Uncle Lucho—already have.”

  My parents were living in the U.S., and my father was a stern man I’d always been very afraid of. I’d been brought up far away from him, with my mother and her family, and when my parents were reconciled and I went to live with him, we had never gotten along well together. He was conservative and authoritarian, given to cold rages, and if it was true that they’d written to him, the news would set him off like a bombshell exploding.

  Aunt Julia grabbed my hand under the table. “You’ve turned deathly pale, Varguitas. This time you’ve got a really good subject for a short story.”

  “What you need to do is to keep your head screwed on straight and not go off the deep end,” Javier said, trying to help me recover from the shock. “Don’t panic, and let’s plan the best possible strategy for facing the avalanche.”

  “They’re furious with you, too,” Nancy warned him. “They’re calling you something terrible too, a, a—”

  “A pander?” Aunt Julia smiled. And then, turning to me, she said with a sad look in her eyes: “What matters most to me is that they’re going to separate us and I won’t ever be able to see you again.”

  “That’s huachafo, and can’t be said like that,” I told her.

  “How well they’ve hidden their real feelings,” Aunt Julia said. “Neither my sister, nor my brother-in-law, nor any of your relatives has even led me to suspect that they knew and that they hated me. The hypocrites: they’ve always been so affectionate with me.”

  “For the time being, the two of you have to stop seeing each other,” Javier said. “Julia should go out with other men, and you should ask other girls out on dates. Let the family think you’ve had a fight.”

  Discouraged, Aunt Julia and I agreed that that was the only solution. But when Nancy left—we swore to her that we’d never betray her—followed by Javier, and Aunt Julia walked back with me to Panamericana, as we went down the Calle Belén, wet with misty rain, hand in hand, with our heads drooping dispiritedly, we both knew, without any need to say so, that such a strategy risked turning what was a lie into the truth. If we didn’t see each other, if we each went out with other people, sooner or later it would all be over between us. But we agreed to phone each other every day, at precise hours that we set, and gave each other a long, lingering kiss on the mouth as we said goodbye.

  As I went up to my shack in the rickety elevator, I felt, as I had at other times, an inexplicable desire to tell my troubles to Pedro Camacho. It was like a premonition, because the principal collaborators of the Bolivian scriptwriter—Luciano Pando, Josefina Sánchez, and Puddler—were waiting for me in the office, absorbed in an animated conversation with Big Pablito as Pascual padded out the news bulletin with all sorts of catastrophes (he had never obeyed my orders forbidding him to include items about dead people, naturally). They waited patiently while I gave Pascual a hand with the last-minute news, and when he and Big Pablito had said good night to us and left the four of us alone in the shack, they looked at each other in embarrassment before saying anything. It was quite plain that what they wanted to talk to me about was the artist.

  “You’re his best friend and that’s why we’ve come to you,” Luciano Pando murmured. He was a walleyed little man in his sixties, all bent over, who wore a greasy muffler day and night, winter and summer. He had on the only suit I’d ever seen him in, a brown one with little blue pinstripes, in tatters from being cleaned and pressed countless times. His right shoe had a tear across the instep through which you could see his sock. “It has to do with a very delicate matter. You’ve doubtless already guessed…”

  “Not really, Don Luciano,” I said to him. “Are you referring to Pedro Camacho? Yes, we’re friends, it’s true, although as you already know, he’s a person one never really gets to know. Is there something wrong?”

  He nodded, but then just stood there staring at his shoes and not saying a word, as though overwhelmed by the thought of what he was about to say. I looked questioningly at Josefina and Puddler, who were also standing there motionless, with grave expressions on their faces.

  “We’re doing this out of affection and gratitude,” Josefina Sánchez trilled in her lovely velvet voice. “Because no one can possibly know, young man, how much we who work in this miserably paid profession owe to Pedro Camacho.”

  “We’ve always been made to feel we were fifth wheels, nobody thought our talents were worth two cents, we had such an inferiority complex we took ourselves to be worthless trash,” Puddler said in a voice so filled with emotion that the thought crossed my mind all of a sudden that Pedro Camacho had met with some sort of accident. “Thanks to him, we discovered that ours was an artistic profession.”

  “But you’re talking about him as though he were dead,” I said.

  “Because what would people do without us?” Josefina Sánchez said, citing the words of her idol without having heard what I’d just said. “Who else gives them the illusions and emotions that help them to go on living?”

  She was a woman who had been given that beautiful voice of hers more or less to make up for the collection of awkward mistakes her body represented. It was impossible to guess exactly how old she was, though she had no doubt passed the half-century mark. Her hair was naturally dark, but she bleached it with peroxide and it peeked out, like yellow straw, from beneath a pomegranate-colored turban and hung down over her ears, without, unfortunately, hiding them altogether, for they were enormous, protruding from her head like dish antennas avidly picking up all the world’s sounds. But her most striking feature was her double chin, a sac of loose folds of skin that drooped down over her multicolored blouses. She had a thick fuzz on her upper lip that might well have been described as a mustache, and she had fallen into the dreadful habit of fingering it as she spoke. Her legs were swathed in elastic support hose like that worn by soccer players, because she suffered from varicose veins. At any other time, her visit would have filled me with curiosity. But that night I was altogether preoccupied with my own problems.

  “I know very well what all of you owe Pedro Camacho,” I said impatiently. “There are good reasons why his serials are the most popular ones all over the country.”

  I saw them exchange looks and screw up their courage. “That’s precisely the point,” Luciano Pando finally said, anxious and upset. “In the beginning, we didn’t pay any attention. We thought they were just careless slips, the sort of absentminded mistakes that everybody makes. And especially somebody who works from sunup to sundown every single day.”

  “But what is it exactly that’s
happening to Pedro Camacho?” I interrupted him. “I don’t have any idea what you’re talking about, Don Luciano.”

  “The serials, young man,” Josefina Sánchez murmured, as though committing a sacrilege. “They’re becoming more and more bizarre.”

  “We actors and technicians are taking turns answering the telephone at Radio Central to fend off protests from the listeners,” Puddler chimed in. His hair looked like shiny porcupine bristles, as though he’d applied great quantities of brilliantine to them; as usual, he was wearing a pair of stevedore’s overalls, and shoes without laces, and he appeared to be on the point of bursting into tears. “So that the Genaros don’t boot him out, sir.”

  “You know very well that he doesn’t have a cent to his name and lives from hand to mouth like the rest of us,” Luciano Pando added. “What would happen to him if they kick him out? He’d die of hunger!”

  “And what about us?” Josefina Sánchez said proudly. “What would become of us without him?”

  They all began to talk at once, telling me everything with a wealth of details. The inconsistencies (the “bloopers,” as Luciano Pando put it) had begun about two months before, but at the beginning they were so trivial that probably only the actors noticed them. They hadn’t said a word to Pedro Camacho because, knowing what he was like, nobody had dared to, and furthermore, for quite a long time they wondered whether he might not be playing deliberate tricks. But in the last three weeks things had become much more serious.

  “It’s all turned into a hopeless mess, I assure you, young man,” Josefina Sánchez said disconsolately. “The serials have all gotten mixed up with each other, to the point that even we can’t untangle one from the other.”

  “Hipólito Lituma has always been a sergeant in the Guardia Civil, the terror of the malefactors of El Callao, in the ten o’clock serial,” Luciano Pando put in, all upset. “But in the last three days that’s turned out to be the name of the judge in the four o’clock serial. His name used to be Pedro Barreda. Just to give you one example.”

  “And now Don Pedro Barreda’s talking about exterminating rats, because they devoured his little girl,” Josefina Sánchez said, her eyes brimming with tears. “When, before, it was Don Federico Téllez Unzátegui’s baby daughter.”

  “You can imagine what a terrible time we have of it at recording sessions,” Puddler stammered. “Saying and doing things that don’t make any sense at all.”

  “And there’s just no way of straightening out the whole mess,” Josefina Sánchez murmured. “Because you’ve seen with your own eyes how Señor Camacho rules over the programs with an iron hand. He doesn’t allow us to change even a comma. Otherwise, he falls into terrible fits of rage.”

  “He’s exhausted—that’s the explanation,” Luciano Pando said, shaking his head sadly. “Nobody can work twenty hours a day and still think straight. He needs a vacation to get back to his old self.”

  “You get along well with the Genaros,” Josefina Sánchez said to me. “Couldn’t you have a talk with them? Just simply tell them he’s exhausted and ask them to give him a few weeks’ rest?”

  “The hardest part will be convincing him to take them,” Luciano Pando said. “But things can’t go on like this. If they do, the Genaros will end up firing him.”

  “People keep calling the station all the time,” Batán said. “It takes real genius to think up ways of evading their questions. And the other day there was even something about the whole business in La Crónica.”

  I didn’t tell them that Genaro Sr. already knew and had asked me to have a talk with Pedro Camacho. We agreed that I should sound out Genaro Jr., and then, depending on his reaction, we would decide whether it was advisable for them to come see him themselves to speak up in the scriptwriter’s defense in the name of all his co-workers. I thanked them for their confidence and tried to bolster their morale a little: Genaro Jr. had a more modern outlook than Genaro Sr. and was more understanding, and surely he could be persuaded to give Pedro Camacho a vacation. We went on talking as I turned out the lights and locked the shack. We shook hands and said goodbye on the Calle Belén. I saw the scriptwriter’s three homely, generous-hearted co-workers disappear down the empty street in the misty rain.

  I didn’t sleep a wink that night. As usual, I found my dinner all ready and being kept warm for me in the oven at my grandparents’, but I couldn’t get a single mouthful down (and in order not to worry my granny, I threw the breaded steak and rice out of sight in the garbage can). The little old couple were in bed but still awake, and when I went into their room to give them a good-night kiss, I eyed them as closely as a police detective, trying to discover the slightest fleeting expression on their faces that would betray the fact that they were upset by my scandalous romance. Nothing, not a sign: they were affectionate and solicitous; my grandfather asked me about one of the words in his crossword puzzle. But they told me the good news: my mama had written that she and my papa would be coming down to Lima for a vacation very soon, and would send word as to the exact date of their arrival. They couldn’t show me the letter because one of the aunts had taken it home with her. There was no question about it: this was the result of the traitorous letters the family had sent them about my romance. My father had doubtless said: “We’re going down to Peru and straighten things out.” And my mother: “How could Julia have possibly done a thing like that!” (She and Aunt Julia had been friends when my family lived in Bolivia and I hadn’t yet reached the age of reason.)

  I slept in a tiny little room, jam-packed with books, valises, and trunks in which my grandparents kept their memorabilia, a great many photographs of their long-ago splendor, when they had a large cotton plantation in Camaná, when grandfather played at being a pioneer farmer-settler in Santa Cruz de la Sierra, when he was consul in Cochabamba or prefect in Piura. Lying on my back in bed in the darkness, I thought a long time about Aunt Julia; sooner or later, in one way or another, they’d manage to separate us. It made me very angry and the whole thing seemed terribly stupid and shabby, and then all of a sudden the image of Pedro Camacho came to my mind. I thought of all the telephone calls back and forth between aunts and uncles and cousins about Aunt Julia and me, and I also began hearing in my imagination all the calls from radio listeners all upset and confused by those characters who’d suddenly changed names and leapt from the three o’clock serial to the five o’clock one, and by those episodes that were becoming as hopelessly tangled as jungle vines, and I tried my best to guess what could be going on in the scriptwriter’s labyrinthine brain, but I didn’t think it was the least bit funny; on the contrary, I was touched to think of the actors at Radio Central conspiring with the sound engineers, the secretaries, the doormen, to intercept the calls in order to keep the artist from being fired. I was touched that Luciano Pando, Josefina Sánchez, and Puddler had thought that I, a real fifth wheel, could influence the Genaros. How little they must think of themselves, what miserable salaries they must earn, if I seemed to them to be an important person by comparison I And every so often I was overcome with an irresistible desire to see, touch, kiss Aunt Julia at that very moment. Then finally I saw day break and heard the dogs barking at dawn.

  I was at my desk in the shack at Panamericana earlier than usual that morning, and when Pascual and Big Pablito arrived at eight, I had already written the bulletins, read all the newspapers, and annotated and marked in red all the news items to be plagiarized. As I did all these things, I kept watching the clock. Aunt Julia called me at exactly the hour we’d agreed on.

  “I didn’t close my eyes all night long,” she murmured in a faint voice I could barely hear. “I love you very much, Varguitas.”

  “I love you too, with all my heart,” I whispered, feeling indignant on seeing Pascual and Big Pablito move closer so as to be able to hear better. “I didn’t sleep at all either, thinking about you.”

  “You can’t imagine how nice my sister and my brother-in-law were to me,” Aunt Julia said. “We stayed up
late playing cards. It’s hard to believe that they know, that they’re plotting against us.”

  “They are, though,” I told her. “My parents have sent word that they’re coming to Lima. And that’s the only possible reason—they never travel at this time of year.”

  She didn’t answer, and in my mind’s eye I could see her on the other end, looking sad, furious, disappointed. I told her again that I loved her.

  “I’ll phone you again at four, as we agreed,” she finally said. “I’m at the Chinese grocery store on the corner and there’s a line waiting. Ciao.”

  I went down to Genaro Jr.’s office, but he wasn’t there. I left a message for him that there was an urgent matter I needed to discuss with him immediately, and just to be doing something, to fill up in some way or other the emptiness I felt, I went to the university. It was the day of my class in penal law, taught by a professor who had always struck me as a character straight out of a short story. A perfect combination of satyriasis and coprolalia, he looked at his girl students as though he were undressing them and used anything and everything as an excuse for double entendres and obscene remarks. When one girl, who was very flat-chested, answered a question well, he congratulated her, savoring the word: “You’re very synthetic, Señorita,” and on commenting on one article in the Code, he launched into a peroration on venereal diseases.

  When I went back to the radio station, Genaro Jr. was waiting for me in his office. “I trust you’re not here to ask me for a raise,” he warned me the moment I entered the door. “We’re on the edge of bankruptcy.”

  “I want to talk to you about Pedro Camacho,” I said, to set his mind at ease on that score.

  “Did you know he’s started to do all sorts of outrageous things?” he said to me, as though laughing at a good joke. “He’s been shifting his characters around from one serial to another, changing their names, mixing up all the plots, and gradually turning all the stories into one. A stroke of genius, don’t you agree?”